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About Dan Turchin

Dan Turchin was BigPanda's VP of Product. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dturchin. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn.


Decompressing from an exhausting, inspirational few days at Knowledge16, the annual ServiceNow event…

From humble beginnings (my first Knowledge was a few hundred attendees in a tent in San Diego), Knowledge has become a global tour de force. This year, Mandalay Bay could barely contain more than 11,000 customers and partners (and the expo hall could barely contain more than 100 decibels of the tech equivalent of Queensryche). Getting into the keynote felt like rush hour on the subway in midtown Manhattan. 

This is part two of a two-part post about using event correlation to thwart DDoS attacks. Channeling Mark Twain: it would have been shorter if I had more time. In the last post I described why DDoS attacks for SaaS providers are no different than performance and availability issues experienced in other domains like healthcare, finance, or retail. In this post I’ll share a customer story about a security breach that never happened… thanks to a savvy DevOps team and data science.

Every company’s a target, every customer’s at risk. But the now-cliched threat of data breaches from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks obscures a bigger threat: outages that impact not just data integrity but also profitability, brand equity, and customer retention. 

The volume of attacks is growing and so is the impact of down time. According to Akamai’s most recent State of the Internet report, DDoS attacks are a bigger threat than ever before. “The number of DDoS attacks continued to increase substantially in Q2 2015, more than doubling the number observed in Q2 2014.”